Essays in the economics of education and program evaluation

The dissertation consists of three essays studying the economics of education and program evaluation. Chapter 1 examines the impact of attending a magnet school on student achievement using school admissions lotteries in Wuhan, China. Although lottery winners were more likely to attend magnet schools that appear better in many dimensions, including peer achievement, I find little evidence that winning a lottery improved students' performance on the High School Entrance Exam or their enrollment status at elite high schools three years later. Magnet school popularity, measured by either the competitiveness of the admission lottery or the take-up rate of lottery winners, is highly positively correlated with the average student achievement, but largely unrelated to the treatment effect on test scores that I estimate for each school. This evidence suggests that parents value peer quality beyond its effect on achievement gains, or confuse average student achievement with value added. The finding that magnet schools are sought mainly for their observed superiority in average student achievement rather than for their academic value added casts doubt on the potential of school choice to improve student achievement, at least in this context. Chapter 2 studies peer effects on student test scores in middle school using a multi-cohort longitudinal data set from China. I base the identification on variation in peer composition across adjacent cohorts within the same school to control for student sorting across schools and the unobserved school characteristics that affect student outcomes.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Zhang, Hongliang, Ph. D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Joshua D. Angrist, Esther Duflo and Karen R. Polenske.

• Economics.
• Urban Studies and Planning.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/55170

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/55170